With each of the Axes, you spoke of bodily differences. That makes the whole framework a bit suspect. It makes it sound like phrenology or the old ectomorph/endomorph stuff that has been roundly discredited. Can you clarify?
A major thesis in CST is that intelligence is more than just intellect. It also involves the affective, the imaginal — and in addition the language of the body. Body intelligence plays an integral role in any CST concept.
Primary energetics are as much bodily patterns as psychological patterns. One of the best ways to tease apart tricky personality distinctions is to note how a person lives in their body, both as movement and structure. Chapter Five in The Creative Imperative presents a description of bodily layering and the functioning of different types of body intelligence within a Creative Systems framework excerpted in the articles section of this site. Primary energetic is only one contributor to bodily life, but it is a sufficiently strong one that it is possible to accurately determine temperament about 80% of the time with bodily cues alone.
Importantly, the cues one draws on concern more than just bodily structure. Ultimately they concern how a person lives in their body. That includes how a person moves. It also includes where in a person’s tissues they carry the greatest bodily charge (for example Earlies tend to carry their charge closer to the bodily core, Lates closer to the surface, while Middle carry more of the their charge in the realms between). We can go so far as to talk about “what” body a person most lives in (CST talks of Earlies living more in the energetic body, Lates more in the physical body, and Middles more in the visceral/muscular body). (See article.)
One of the powers of the CSPT is that it is descriptive equally of differences that derive from each of our ways of organizing experience. We can think of the CSPT just as usefully as a taxonomy of in how we think, how we relate, the values we hold, the symbols we are likely to find in our dreams and metaphors, the kinds of art of music we will most appreciate, how we move, or how we structure our bodies. It is about how we organize as whole systems.
